"Broken tools, that tyrants cast away By myriads, when they dare to pave their way With human hearts."
We can easily believe in the greater freedom during the reign of Philip III. "Viva el Rey."
The Count de Lemos was his near friend and protector when he brought out the second part of "Don Quixote," and ridiculed his rival imitator. He was a pioneer of so elevated a character as to preclude the possibility of followers. Every one is familiar with it as a story, and the mishaps of the gentle, noble-minded, kind-hearted old Don, as well as the delusions, simplicity, and selfishness of the devoted squire, will never lose their power to amuse. It may be extravagant, but it is not a burlesque. The strong character painting, the ideas, situations, and language, clothed in such simplicity that at times it becomes almost solemn, give it a grandeur that no other book, considered as a romance, possesses. The old anecdote of the king observing a student walking by the river side and bursting into involuntary fits of laughter over a book, exclaiming, "The man is either mad or reading 'Don Quixote,'" is well preserved. One peculiar feature of the book is that, even now, for some places, it would be a useful guide, many of the habits and customs of Spain three hundred years ago being still the same. What a volume of wit and wisdom is contained in the proverbs and aphorisms. One might quote from it indefinitely had he not told us that "without discretion there is no wit." His own motive in writing it we find in the last paragraph of the book, namely, "My sole object has been to expose to the contempt they deserved the extravagant and silly tricks of chivalry, which this my true and genuine 'Don Quixote' has nearly accomplished, their worldly credit being now actually tottering, and will doubtless soon sink, never to rise again."
Now, all languages have it. There are eight translations into English alone; but it is always impossible for the translator to render its true spirit or to give it full justice. With all its vivacity and drollery, its delicate satire and keen ridicule, it has a mournful tinge of melancholy running through, and here and there peeping out, only to have been gathered from such experience as his. He wrote with neither bitterness nor a diseased imagination, always realizing what is due to himself and with a full appreciation of and desire for fame. Many scenes of real suffering appear under a dramatic guise, and here and there creep out bits of personal history. His nature was chivalrous in the highest degree. His sorrows were greater than his joys. Born for the library, he prefers the camp, and abandons literature to fight the Turks. Does he not make the Don say, "Let none presume to tell me the pen is preferable to the sword." Again he says: "Allowing that the end of war is peace, and that in this it exceeds the end of learning, let us weigh the bodily labors the scholar undergoes against those the warrior suffers, and then see which are the greatest." Then he enumerates: "First, poverty; and having said he endures poverty, methinks nothing more need be urged to express his misery, for he that is poor enjoys no happiness, but labors under this poverty in all its guises, at one time in hunger, at another in cold, another in nakedness, and sometimes in all of them together." Later on he makes him say: "It gives me some concern to think that powder and lead may suddenly cut short my career of glory."